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Building a strong brand isn’t just about having an engaging visual identity or distinct brand voice. It’s also important to stay active in the same spaces as your target audience so you can raise and maintain brand awareness for your business.
The spaces where you connect with your audience are called customer touchpoints or brand touchpoints. These touchpoints can be in online spaces like social media, in person, or both.
To identify the right touchpoints for your business, start by mapping out your customer journeys and finding out which existing touchpoints are already working.
What is a brand touchpoint?
Brand touchpoints are any places where you make contact with potential customers and existing customers. These touchpoints can be part of your marketing strategy or just part of your typical interactions with customers.
Common brand touchpoint examples include:
In-person events
Paid ads
Physical stores
Search engine results
Knowing how to build a brand on social media and other stages of the customer journey helps you become a regular presence in your customers’ day-to-day. That regular presence builds familiarity with your brand over time and keeps you top-of-mind for prospective customers.
1. Map the customer journey
To figure out the right touchpoints for your brand, spend some time researching your target audience. Your target audience is your ideal follower or customer. Get to know them—their demographics, other brands they follow, and especially their behavioral patterns online.
Use that research to get a good idea of where to find new customers online and when and how to engage with them. This process is known as customer journey mapping. It will help you to plan your social media posts and other marketing messages.
The customer journey, also known as the marketing funnel, has five key stages.
Awareness: This is when people learn that your product exists—via your social media, your advertising, or from search engine results. This can also be followed by an Interest stage when the customer wants to learn more about you.
Consideration: In the next phase, someone clicks through to your website and engages with your content. That could be signing up for your emails, claiming a free trial, or browsing your store. This is sometimes called the pre-purchase stage and might be followed by Evaluation, the final deliberation stage.
Purchase: When a customer pays you for your content or buys a product from you. This is also known as conversion or acquisition.
Retention: This stage is focused on creating customer loyalty through continued marketing and loyalty programs. This is also the start of the post-purchase phase.
Advocacy: The ideal end goal of retention is advocacy—when someone becomes a word-of-mouth supporter of your brand. They’ll make referrals for you or reshare your content on their own social profiles.
How to map the customer journey
A detailed customer journey should detail how you plan to get a customer from each stage of the funnel to the next. To create your own customer journey map, make a plan for:
Where you’ll build awareness for your brand or products
Where you want to send potential customers to learn about your brand and what you want them to know
How you’ll persuade someone to go from Consideration to Purchase
How you’ll continue to engage with customers to earn their trust and loyalty
Each stage of the journey is about the overall customer experience. If you invest in customer satisfaction—catching someone’s interest in stage one, providing useful information at stage two, making browsing and buying seamless at stage three—someone will want to move on to the next part of the journey.
2. Check in on any existing touchpoints
If you’ve already started your brand or business, you may already have some brand touchpoints in place, like a website or social media account. Regularly analyzing those existing brand touchpoints will help you stay on top of customer satisfaction and the effectiveness of your marketing. It will also highlight where and how you need to make improvements.
Schedule a monthly check-in on any of the places you’re interacting with customers. If customer engagement drops, start with easily fixable aspects before you make bigger changes.
For example, if you’re seeing customers make it to your online store but not getting to checkout, try updating your product photos or descriptions. If website traffic from social media or search engines is down this month, do some further digging.
Did the search terms that usually send visitors to your website change? You might need to update your SEO strategy. Did you try posting new types of content this month? Look back at what types of posts have been successful and try to apply that elsewhere.
Over time, you’ll figure out what your target audience responds to most so that you can focus on what they prefer to see.
Learn more about using analytics to grow your business
3. Collect customer feedback
One of the best ways to figure out what your customers want is simply to ask them.
You can keep it straightforward: Run a customer experience poll on your Facebook or LinkedIn page or poll your Instagram followers on what types of content they like to see. Or make a short survey and link it to a form on your website asking visitors about their experience. Use that to get details on how they found you, areas for improvement, and whether you gave them what they needed at every stage of the customer journey.
Keep track of any notable social media interactions. Create a spreadsheet or document to record comments and high-performing posts and update it routinely. It will help you to understand how customers feel about your social presence, your products, and your brand in general.
4. Improve your brand touchpoints
It’s important to deliver a positive brand experience at every stage of the customer journey. After you’ve set up your touchpoints and evaluated their performance, think about how you could make each one even better. Here’s a quick checklist to help get you started.
Customer support: What experience do people have when they buy from or work with you? Is there any information that indicates customers are satisfied? Could you gather feedback from those customers in some way?
Digital content: Look at your blog, podcasts, and videos. Where is the most engagement occurring and who is engaging? What type of content seems to get the most interaction?
Pop-ups and announcement banners: Do the announcements you add to your site or the ads you pay for perform? Do certain messages or placements get better results than others?
Reviews: What do your product reviews or client feedback forms say? What about feedback on review websites? Can you take any of that feedback and use it to inform new product ideas or improvements to your brand touchpoints?
Social media: What channels are you using and which accounts get the most engagement? Could you add a channel or a different kind of post to your regular mix?
These are just a few of the essentials. When you analyze your own communications, you’ll be sure to identify more. Consider every last one and you’ll be in a much stronger position to create a brand that resonates at every stage of the customer journey.
This post was updated on June 30, 2023.